Nearly a dozen civilians have lost their lives when the US-led coalition purportedly fighting the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group conducted a series of airstrikes in Syria’s embattled eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr.
Civil sources, requesting not to be named, told Syria’s official news agency SANA on Sunday that US-led warplanes bombarded a refugee camp on the outskirts of the besieged village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border, killing at least ten people who had fled the last vestiges of Daesh's territorial rule in eastern Syria.
The sources added that there are women and children among the fatalities, stressing that intense US-led aerial assaults have transformed Baghouz into a “ghost city.”
The development came only a day after US-led warplanes carried out a string of airstrikes against the same Syrian region, claiming the lives of many civilians and injuring several others.
The US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes and operations against what are said to be Daesh targets inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a United Nations mandate.
The military alliance has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of achieving its declared goal of destroying Daesh.
On February 12, the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, in two separate letters addressed to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the former rotating president of the Security Council, Anatolio Ndong Mba, denounced the coalition strikes conducted against Baghouz a day earlier, saying the US-led warplanes had pounded a refugee camp.
Local sources told the state-run Ikhbariyah Syria television news network that 16 civilians, including seven children, were killed as a result of the raid.
“This new crime is in line with the series of war crimes and crimes against humanity, which the US-led coalition has perpetrated against Syrian people, its continued support for terrorism, and its use of terrorists and separatist militia forces to advance its fiendish plots aimed at Syria’s sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity,” said the letters.
The ministry also called on the UN Security Council to stand up against such attacks and crimes.
It also demanded that the UN body assume its responsibilities regarding the establishment of international peace and security, conduct an international probe into these criminal acts, condemn them, and put an immediate halt to such air raids as well as the “aggressive” presence of American and other foreign military forces in Syria.